What happened down here?1
In the hold of a
ghosted ship, in the hold of
their grip, in the thrall of an image circulating in newly subterranean
form? Brown cloud billows against patches of bluegreen etched here and
there by shadow. The frame dials left, then right, in measured motion.
A robotic arm rotates, reaches and grasps, fails and retreats. Repeat.
A small fish floats into the frame. Zoom out. Zoom in. Seeing, here, is
sequenced by algorithms of hyperindustrial focus. Here, deep
water’s
horizon is blasted out of an infinite black into a fracked metric of
light and time. Zoom in. Zoom out. Zoom in. What can happen down here?
Live streaming new scholarly forms in the liquid rush of digital times
raptured by disaster, and its release. "No way where we are is here ...
And so it is we remain in the hold, in the break, as if entering
again and again the broken world, to trace the visionary company and
join it" (Harney and Moten, 2013, p. 94).

In the live stream.

Occult
ontologies (thinking with oil)

"Oil
… [is] a substance that was, once, live matter and that acts
with a force suggestive of a form of life."
-Stephanie LeMenager, Living Oil

"The underworld is not really dead."
-Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets

Set
on the edge of an oil field in southern
California, Fritz Leiber's 1964 short story "Black Gondolier" narrates
the mystical vision of one of its main characters, in which crude oil
is revealed as an "ancient and enigmatic manifestation" of the occult
world (Thacker, 2011, p. 92). Dreaming its dark dreams for millennia,
oil's "chemical mind" manifests as a sentient form of viscous thought,
patiently working to become the animating intelligence of modern
industrial regimes. Humans, it is revealed, did not discover oil. Oil
waited for millions of inhuman years, "sluggishly pulsing beneath
Earth's stony skin," to discover humans as its animate puppets, and
modern technologic infrastructures as its geopsychic medium (Leiber,
cited in Thacker, 2011). The brief, oozing horror story ends with the
mystical theorist disappearing into a dark, desiring sea of midnight
oil, the silent black gondolier at his side.

In Eugene Thacker's extended meditation on
occult philosophy, Leiber's story marks the power of popular horror to
conjure the "magic site, deep within the crusts and caverns of the
planet, in which the hidden world oozes and gropes forth to the
surface" (p. 91). The magic site performs a bewitching and always
potentially fatal encounter at the border of the natural and the
supernatural—that hidden realm that can nonetheless bleed through
in
underground fissures or mining operations when, perhaps, an accidental
revelation invites the supernatural to suddenly gaze back, with unhuman
eyes, at us (p. 82). Channeling the science fantasy writer H.P.
Lovecraft, Thacker imagines how today the magic site, mutated by modern
sorceries of science and technology, radiates outward in a diffuse,
atmospheric fallout that no longer marks a distinct border between
natural and supernatural worlds, but which instead marks the
oscillating, ungovernable boundary between them (pp. 76-77). Once upon
a
time the magic circle—predecessor to the magic site, and
evidenced for
centuries in European pagan and theatrical practices—offered
ritualized
protections from the supernatural in the bounded spacetime of its
conjuring. Today, the human world stumbles without ritual safety
through realms simultaneously empirical and occulted, through modes of
time both perceivable and preternaturally unreal. In the dispersed
psychogeography of the magic site, "natural and supernatural blend into
a kind of ambient, atmospheric no-place…bathed in the alien
ether of
unknowable dimensions" (p. 77).
How really to think the thought that thought may be unhuman? How to
think with oil, that sentient philosophy living in the interstices, in
the tiny voids in sedimented rock, gathering in unhuman dimensions of
heat, pressure, dark, and time? Millions of unthinkable human years to
form itself into a viscous thought. How to re-think the BP disaster,
erupting out of the offshore oil industry's subsea infrastructures, as
a magic site? An enchanted catastrophe of supernatural time, compressed
in the void, old time heaving into metaphysical motion by the blowout
of an underwater oil well in the Gulf of Mexico that BP had curiously
named "Macondo," after that magical realist town in Gabriel
García
Márquez's One Hundred Years
of Solitude
that blows away in the wind by the end of the story. It is deep time
that burned on that flaming rig at sea. It is earth's millennial
thinking that spread with a numinous, relentless geo-logic through the
startled waters.

You can say that sometimes thought
tries to bend toward
the dark, in
the occult company of unthinkable forms of
time. You can say that
catastrophe cuts a portal between
different modes of time, and the dead
pour through the
open door while a thousand possible futures are
buried.
You can say that the catastrophe of time itself—bursting
into
the sudden clearing of an accidental apocalypse,
self-immolating in the
mundane daily burn of
petro-modern infrastructures—still tries
to
enchant at the supernatural site
of its own undoing.

"Oil . . . is a medium," writes Stephanie
LeMenager in Living Oil,
"that fundamentally supports all modern media forms" (2014, p. 6).
Without the mediations of oil it would be difficult, she suggests, to
hold on to the cultural category of "human." But oil also helps us to
grasp some of the less thinkable contours of the unhuman, undulating us
towards planetary temporal scales that petro-modernity effaces even as
it requires them for its energetic foundations. Oil thinks deeply as
medium of the dead. As archivist of fossilized matters, from mammals to
plant life to marine organisms, oil knows how to become the thought of
decay that itself has not died. Oil is a medium for a living repertoire
of microbial matters, including hundreds of species of microorganisms
discovered in the Los Angeles La Brea
tar pit, "living bacteria, progeny of soil microorganisms trapped in
the petrol sumps tens of thousands of years ago" (p. 155). We can
think, with oil, that time itself may be thinking in the sedimented
form of "fossil" fuels. We can think with oil as a medium in which time
thinks itself into form.

"[I]t was always March
there and always Monday, and then
they understood that José Arcadio
Buendía was not as
crazy as the family said, but that he was the
only
one
who had enough lucidity to sense the truth of the
fact that time
also stumbled and had accidents
andc ould therefore splinter and leave
an
eternalized fragment in a room."
-Gabriel García Márquez,
One Hundred Years Of Solitude

The subterranean thought of time dwelling
in the bodymind of oil is an indescribably slow thinking. A millennial
thinking that gives notice to the slow disaster of time itself, as
"petro-capitalism's omnivorous appetite for time" (Nixon, 2011, p. 97)
striates human and non-human worlds with depleted signs of exhaustion.
If "energy wars are time wars as well" (p. 99), then the enclosures
enforced by petro-modernity's primitive accumulations include the real
and imaginary enclosure of time. Capitalism becomes time's sorcerer;
the slow thought of oil becomes its material engine and its infernal
adversary. Speed is the currency of speculative economies of future
energy, as transnational fortunes rise and fall with the occult
brokering of the price of a barrel of oil. To get a hold on the hold
that petro-capitalism, as sorcery, has over us (Pignarre and Stengers,
2011), is to get a hold on how time's enclosure creates energetic binds
by which we become beholden to our own capture. Sorceries and
superstitions are dangers that we "believe we have
destroyed whereas above all we have lost the appropriate means of
responding to [them]" (p. 40). How to see that the inability to protect
ourselves from sorcery's hold is precisely why "in the eyes of these
reputedly superstitious ‘others' . . . the disaster becomes
perfectly
foreseeable" (Pignarre and Stengers, 2011, p. 40)? How to inhabit the
slow, accumulating thought that catastrophe's future is already,
ineluctably, here?

"Macondo was in
ruins. In the swampy streets
there were the
remains of furniture, animal skeletons
covered with red lilies .…
[Everything] seemed to have been
blown away in an anticipation of the
prophetic wind
that years later would wipe Macondooff the face of the earth."
-García Márquez

One hundred years of
sorcery

In 1901, oil blasts through six tons of
drilling pipe to create the world's first accidental "gusher" in
Spindletop, Texas, somewhat cataclysmically announcing (oil-drenched
crews labored for over a week to stop the gush) the discovery of the
largest petroleum reserve to date on U.S. land. This is land only
recently
settled into its manifest yet never-fully-destined national contours
after the expansive capture of sovereign territory from Mexico and the
semi-legalized dispossession of indigenous land right from
Massachusetts to California and all the curiously ‘native'-named
states-of-dispossession-in-between: Alabama, Kentucky, Louisiana,
Minnesota, Montana, Oklahoma. To sing just a few. Spindletop rises and
crashes as home also to the first boom-and-bust cycle of wild oil
speculation in the U.S. as 600 new companies move into town in the next
twelve months (Freudenburg and Gramling, 2011, pp. 80-81). An oil well
launched with a $10,000 investment soon sells for $1,250,000, as
hundreds of millions of dollars pour like liquid gold into Texas before
the "exuberant" catastrophe of finitude—the oil stops—brings
Spindletop to its knees (Buell, 2012).
In Texas and its kin in early U.S. oil exploration, Pennsylvania, the
search for oil stumbles over two distinct problems. First, how to find
it? Second, what to do with it? The black "rock oil," as it was called,
is used as a medicinal cure by white settler colonists in the early
19th century for a wide swath of human sicknesses. By the end of that
century, oil is alchemically conjured into kerosene and used to light
the dark. Kerosene lamps blaze a new geography of night and day for an
increasingly enlightened industrial capitalism.
Finding a new geologic algorithm for continuous illumination is aided
by late 19th century spiritualist practices of divination and spirit
possession. Popularly acclaimed "wizards of oil" wander the surface of
the earth in a trance state with divining rods and witching sticks,
searching for underground veins of oil (Zuck, 2012). Accompanied by
indigenous spirit-guides from the dispossessed Seneca Nation, Abraham
James, on the 31st of October 1866, All Hallow's Eve, is travelling
just south
of Pleasantville, Pennsylvania, when he is "forcefully possessed by his
spirit-guides and conveyed out of the buggy and over a fence on the
east side of the road" where "spirits communicated" that he is
"standing on an immense oil deposit" (Zuck, 2012,
p. 314, p. 332). In 1867,
Harmonial well No. 1 is dug near the spot and begins producing daily
over 100 barrels of oil, followed by three other productive wells in
the same area. As the "industrial aspirations of [American]
spiritualism" (Zuck, 2012,
p. 316) vibrate together with the magical
realism of
early U.S. oil discovery, oil appears in the interstices between
supernatural animations and capitalist sorceries of valued matter.
Abraham James, who also divines the psycho-geologics of the less
successful "Spirit Well" under the auspices of the short-lived Chicago
Rock Oil Company founded by members of the local Spiritualist
community, suggests that "oil itself could function as a kind of
medium," communicating Spiritualism's capacity to channel the materiel
needs of modern capitalism (Zuck, 2012,
pp. 324-25).
By the 1920s the discovery and production of U.S. oil is increasingly
standardized by the monopoly power of the Rockefeller enterprise. The
spiritualist psychometrics of vibrational divination give way to the
speculative arts of petroleum geology in pursuit of oil's subterranean
lines of flight. Militarized national economies of world war generate
cascading use-values for fossil fuels, and by 1945 both petroleum and
the instrumental polymerization of waste products from its industrial
production begin to restructure the geographies and psychic economies
of U.S. society. As petroleum becomes the "material and energetic basis
of everyday life" in the Cold War U.S. of A., the racialized class
geographies of white suburbanization are built on an emergent
petro-privatization built on oil, gasoline, asphalt, vinyl, and
plasticized domestic interiors built on early intimations of the
neoliberal dream of an ownership society built on automobility,
nuclearized family relations, and the mandatory fantasy of
self-entrepreneurship (Huber, 2012, p. 302, pp. 305-307). The
enchantments
of petroleum-based plastic objects begin to offer, like their celluloid
predecessors, a new materialism for simulation: proliferating plastic
copies of commodity-objects begin to regularly disappear only to
magically reappear in exactly the same form. The pen, the shampoo
container, the nylons, the toy bucket. Polymerized molecular
derivatives of deep time perform disposability without loss. Psychic
and political economies attune to accelerating, repetitious circuits of
replacement and obsolescence followed by serial renewal. Post-war U.S.
consumer cultures energetically lean on a capitalist alchemy of
fossilized fuel and its technoscientific extraction and transmutation.
The train winds its way over and around the infinity loop of track,
travelling past a school, cheerful houses, a church, and a roadside
Texaco gas station tucked next to a miniature highway. The controls for
the giant toy train set are placed in front of the Crown Prince Sa'ud
ibn 'Abd al-'Azīz, fêted in 1947 at a grand soirée at the
Waldorf
Astoria attended by 75 guests from New York City banks, the U.S. State
Department, Bechtel, and several U.S. petroleum companies including
Aramco, which hosts the gala affair just as the industry enters an era
of postwar but not quite postcolonial restructuring. At the end of the
Waldorf dinner, Crown Prince al-'Azīz is entertained by an Egyptian
magician and a chorus line of dancing Rockettes (Vitalis, 2002, p. 207;
Vitalis, 2009, p. 32).
A decade before the Crown Prince's visit, Aramco builds the city of
Dhahran as a new company town in the desert of eastern Saudi Arabia
after the discovery of oil in the region, drawing on the racist
architectures of Jim Crow America and the spatial violence of similar
oil "camps" run by U.S. business in Columbia, Venezuela, Indonesia and
elsewhere, which were themselves modeled on 19th-century mining towns
blooming at the hungry borders of a colonial grab for subterranean
minerals (Vitalis, 2002, p. 200; also Vitalis, 2009, pp. 54-61). By the
early 1950s, Aramco morphs into a miniature State Department
intelligence service mimicking the wartime Office of Strategic
Service's division for Middle East intelligence and propaganda, and
offering a hospitable regional outpost for early officials of the CIA
(Vitalis, 2002, p. 190). In Saudi Arabia in 1948, a year after the
enchanted Aramco evening, the Crown Prince's father, King 'Abd al-'Azīz
Ibn Sa'ud, reports to a visiting State Department official: "The whole
people are saying that my country is an American colony. They are
plotting against me and saying Ibn Sa'ud has given his country to the
United States, even the Holy Places…. I have nothing, and my
country
and my wealth I have delivered into the hands of America" (Vitalis,
2002, p. 200).
In 1953, after nearly a century of preeminence, the United States loses
its global hegemony in oil production, no longer the sole nation mining
over half the world's petroleum supplies. In 1954, Iran nationalizes
its oil industry after throwing out the Shah who returns a year later,
bringing back a more ecumenical petrol policy with the occult help of
the CIA and the British government. In 1954, British Petroleum is born,
shape-shifting from its previous colonial incarnations as the
Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and, originally, the Anglo-Persian Oil
Company founded in 1909 (Freudenburg and Gramling, 2011, pp. 100-106).
As huge oil fields are discovered in the deserts of what are now known
as Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Bahrain, and Kuwait, entrepreneurial
spirits in the Cold War U.S. turn to the Gulf of Mexico where offshore
oil production was launched in 14 feet of water in 1938—the same
year
that Mexico nationalizes its oil industry. Created by millions of years of sand, soil, and
salt deposits sculpted
into a singular underworld edged by the continental margins and the
mouth of a giant river recently named the Mississippi, the Gulf of
Mexico manifests as a potential "world class petroleum province." In
1957, the Zapata Offshore Company—named after the assassinated
Mexican
revolutionary and guerilla warrior for the poor by Zapata's founder,
the Texas oilman and future millionaire, CIA director, and U.S.
President, George H.W. Bush—successfully designs a new drilling
platform that enables offshore oil production in the Gulf to move for
the first time into depths of over 100 feet (National Commission, 2011,
pp. 22-24).
Plagued regularly by monstrous hurricanes which ravage offshore
infrastructure, and threatened by the political force of a U.S.
environmental movement in the wake of the January 1969 blowout of an
offshore well in the Santa Barbara Channel that generates 30 miles of
blackened California coastline, an 800-square-mile oil slick, and the
first annual Earth Day in 1970—the U.S. offshore oil industry
deepens
its hold. Drilling in depths of over 300 feet in the Gulf of Mexico by
1970, the industry is buoyed by a series of technoscientific
innovations, including digital 3D seismic imaging to animate the
speculative geophysics of locating oil, and the first successful remote
control engineering of a subsea wellhead celebrated as an achievement
"akin to John Glenn's space orbit." By 1980, Shell Oil is drilling in
the Gulf in over 1,000 feet of water, the official definition of
"deepwater" (National
Commission, 2011, pp. 25-31).
British Petroleum, staggered by expulsion from former colonial
territories—Iran after the 1979 revolution and Nigeria, the same
year,
after its nationalization of oil—partners with Shell in the late
1980s
on a new deepwater oil well 3000 feet below the Gulf's surface. The
$1.2 billion project, code-named Mars, saves British Petroleum from
bankruptcy. The company pursues deepwater drilling throughout the 1990s
with speculative flair, emerging by the millennium as the largest oil
producer in the Gulf of Mexico. Atlantis, Mad Dog, Crazy Horse, and
Blind Faith, compose a series of non-randomly signifying oil fields
that the company christens in the Gulf over the next several years,
promising BP over two billion gallons of commercially exploitable oil
at
underwater depths of up to 7,000 feet (National Commission 2011, p.
36-37 and 45-50).
Oil, however, is not an interminable thought. By the time BP begins
drilling the Macondo well in 2009, the wizardry of "subsea
infrastructures" (Markeset et al. 2013) for the globalizing offshore
oil industry has been forced into deeply occulted territory. Millennial
matter grows exhausted; the Macondo well lies 5000 feet below the
water's surface, and its oil fields another 13,000 feet under the
subsea floor. The Sorcerer appears tireless. To work at the necessary
depths, BP deploys the liquid robotics of remotely operated vehicles
(ROVs), first developed by the U.S. Navy and used to recover underwater
atomic bomb debris (Wagner et al., 2010; Newman, 2010). Oceaneering
International, Inc., specialists in subsea hardware and manufacturers
of the ROVs used by BP to build and then destroy the Macondo well, runs
a parallel entertainment division that produces animatronics for
robotically engineered theme park attractions including simulations of
dinosaurs, alien bugs, and downtown Tokyo. The live streaming of an
exploding Macondo well captivates millions of viewers in the U.S. with
the real time aesthetics of disaster delivered by cameras attached via
subsea ‘umbilical’ cords to a human operator with a
joystick in a control room on the water’s surface (Black, 2010;
Farbman, 2012). As the Politician calls on the Sorcerer to show his
hand and supply submerged digital images for the People (Black, 2010,
p. 743); as privatized corporate screens for robotic command and
control become public live streams of mesmerizing catastrophe; as time
ticks online and off, from milliseconds, to minutes, to days, to
nights, to months to 4.9 million barrels of deep time blasted out of
the sea floor into acres of undulating water . . . oil keeps thinking.
In the interstices. Even as the Sorcerer moves ever closer, ever
confident, toward the occulted void.

Magic and method

If magical realism is not only a genre of
writing but also a genre of power, exercised through the binding of
enchantment and the empirical—say, a ghost devil and a labor
regime (Taussig, 1980); contagious phantasms and an economic implosion
(Nelson, 2012). If energy infrastructures are assembled via both
supernatural and material economies; if the exploding Macondo well in
the Gulf of Mexico is both a magic site and a singular node in a
transnational nexus of multibillion dollar petroleum production and
profits, then how to tell a story that can dwell long enough in the
portal between magical efficacy and persuasive history to have a
fighting chance to change perceptions of what’s really real?
"Reality
is more than that which exists," writes Eduardo Kohn (2013, p. 216)
from the ethnographic edge of a thinking forest in Ecuador. How to
write from other edges, toward a real that exceeds what exists?
Petro-magic-realism is Jennifer Wenzel's (2006) useful term linking
literary production to the violent political ecologies of resource
extraction in countries that produce both magical realist stories and
petroleum as commodity exports to the Global North.2
Countering the "empty globalism" of magical realism as a genre-category
in which "the magical might be anything unfamiliar to a European or
American reader," Wenzel's petro-magic-realism foregrounds "the
relationships between the fantastic and material elements of these
stories, linking formal, intertextual, sociological, and economic
questions about literature to questions of political ecology" (Welnzel,
2006, pp.
456, 450). Abdelrahman Munif's novel
Cities of Salt (1987) conjures a
light shimmer of petro-magic-realism across 600 pages narrating the
Americans' arrival in the Saudi desert to drill the first oil field.
The "inexplicable, the hallucinatory, and the realistic converge" as
the radically displaced local Bedouins witness the magic technologies
used by the U.S. oilmen to penetrate both "geologic and spiritual
substrates" in their relentless, bewitched forays underground (Nixon,
2011, p. 93-94).
Theories of magical realism also look beyond literary practice to
relations between the fantastic and the material located in the very
heart of social power. Michael Taussig's (1984) analysis of another
extractive economy—the rubber industry in late 19th-century South
America—names magical realism as a political force. Here, the
"mysterious side of the mysterious," condensed through image, fantasy,
and myth, "create[s], through magical realism, a culture of terror"
animating a colonial imaginary: "What distinguishes cultures of terror
is that the epistemological, ontological, and otherwise purely
philosophical problem of reality-and-illusion … [becomes] a
high-powered tool for domination and a principal medium of political
practice" (Taussig, 1984, p. 492). Revealing the cultural work of
magical
realism in assembling business and terror into the intimate cut of
everyday worlds, Taussig moves magical realism toward an analytics of
ordinary power, practiced through extraordinary renditions of torture
and a political economy of terrors both fabulated and real.
But what if magic can move even further? Beyond and beneath the
fantastic im/materiality or efficacious murk of
‘reality-and-illusion'
that constitute the storied formations of colonizing power and
capitalist exploitation? What happens if we press through and beyond
the "dialectic optic," offered by Walter Benjamin and re-incarnated in
Taussig, as an antidote to spiraling mysticisms (Taussig, 1984, p.
469)? What if there are occult agencies, animate unknowns, coursing
through the dense circuits of symbolic and political economies? Subreal
agencies that are not unreal. Submerged but not always subordinate.
Impenetrable and yet still capable of penetrating culturenatures in
subnatural and never fully knowable ways.

"[T]he boy
enjoyed the story
of…the fisherman who borrowed
a weight
for his net from a
neighbor and when he gave him a
fish in payment later it had a
diamond
in its stomach, and
the one about the lamp that fulfilled wishes and
about
flying carpets. Surprised, he asked Ursula if all that
was true
and she answered him that it was, that
many years ago the gypsies had
brought magic
lamps and flying mats to Macondo. 'What's
happening,' she sighed, 'is that the world
is slowly coming to an end
and those things
don't come here anymore.'"

-García
Márquez

Eugene
Thacker's magic site is one image of subreal force. As an occult
philosopher of contemporary horror, he evokes the technoscientific
laboratory that has become the real, a dispersed, unbounded
materialization of supernatural agencies inseparably mingled with
techno-nature. The branded BP disaster unfolds within emergent subsea
infrastructures of deepwater drilling and extraction, and also within a
magical subrealist scene of prophetic catastrophe and enchanted time.
The extraordinary power of enchantments pulses within the ordinary play
of things when an oil well named after a doomed city in García
Márquez's 1967 tale of supernatural time is blown out of an
imaginary
future into the foreseeable disaster of the present, materializing in a
relentless swell of mud and oil and subterranean force. Enchantment
arrives inside superstitious time, a time that can warp into curved
lines of fate and chance as a spell of oblivion is cast across magical,
real worlds.
"Every oil spill remembers every other," writes Stephanie LeMenager
(2014, p. 64). And what if every oil spill remembers more than that?
What if "the time of enchantment enacts repetition's strange power
through relays across time that aren't supposed to happen" (Burlein and
Orr, 2012, p. 17)? Perhaps the BP oil spill does remember with uncanny
precision the all-too-real history of the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill,
enacted with ferocious repetition in 2010: that "the oil industry
had no means of remediating spills; that industry had long been aware
of the dangers of drilling . . . ; that Corexit, the dispersant favored
by Union Oil [and then BP] was toxic to marine life" (LeMenager, 2014,
p. 33). But the catastrophe of Macondo, that dispersed magic site of
time-shattered story, may also offer a strange, subreal relay of
impossible timings as the blowout sinks the $350 million Deepwater
Horizon oil rig in a red-orange inferno on Earth Day, April 22, 2010.
In fact, on the fortieth anniversary of the first Earth Day organized
on April 22, 1970, amidst the atmospheric fallout of the Santa Barbara
spill and the spiraling smoke, visionary and real, from the bonfire of
the birds—burned with the other bloating carcasses on the
petro-drenched beaches by black and brown prison workers bused in from
San Lois Obispo, Santa Clara, San Diego to clean the spoiled surfaces
of Santa Barbara (LeMenager, 2014, pp. 60-62).3
To speak of magical subrealism is not to make a sociological claim, or
a superstitious provocation. It is perhaps to speak on the order of
what Pignarre and Stengers call the "witch's proposition," which does
not "ask for the conversion of those to whom it is addressed. When
witches address others, they do nothing other...than relay, echo the
question that transformed them themselves—existential
catalysis"
(Pignarre and Stengers, 2011, p. 141). As a mode of relay and
transmission, magical subrealism
proposes that we look elsewhere or underneath our proliferate empirical
scholarship and theoretical innovation to pursue more deeply a "hunger
for entanglement" (LeMenager, 2014, p. 194) between the human and
unhuman, the visible and the subterranean, the living and the dead.
Between what is known and what will never be. Magical subrealism
proposes that if BP has partnered with Magic Earth, a 3D modeling and
simulation software company, to launch a Visualization
Center
at the University of Colorado, then it may be time for a critical
feminist technoscience to pursue its own militant enchantments and
counter-sorceries. To visualize its own subreal understandings of the
hold that capitalist technoscience has, and the protections needed to
evade our own capture.

Subreal infrastructures

"With
infrastructure, something both huge
and hidden is conjured up—a dark and indistinct shadow of a thing
that
needs to function in order for it not to be thought about. Beneath
structure, below architecture, under life as we know it . . . . it [is]
precisely within the infrastructural that societies articulate their
political imagination, and guide how they want to live."
-Céline
Condorelli, "Infrastructure"

How do you want to live? Chanter
(from the French—to sing, to chant) is at the etymological heart
of
enchantment. Chants can be heard as "resonant dwelling places;"
to enchant is to reanimate the question "'Where and how do we dwell?'"
(Bayer 2012, pp. 27-28). Enchanting catastrophe at the edge of the
sixth
mass extinction, at the site of what is now a subsea desert soaked in
degraded oil stretching across 3000 square miles in the Gulf of Mexico,
is to wonder how to inhabit the times in which I live (Ceballos et.
al., 2015; Juhasz, 2015).

The infrastructural is a kind of dwelling
place … hidden, unthought,
beneath, shadowed, below, in
Céline
Conderelli's meditation. Under life
as we know it, the infrastructural
builds material and imaginary enclosures between what's possible and
what's not. "The petroleum infrastructure has become embodied memory
and habitus for modern humans" (LeMenager, 2011, p. 26). Perhaps a
collective encounter with infrastructures of the subreal might help us
imagine, or remember, differently. Perhaps today it is not our task to
save the planet, but rather, to burn it. Which we are doing. What we
fail to do, repeatedly, is to read the hieroglyphs of our own incense,
the patterns of temporary matter in time, which might tell us for what
or for whom we really burn. Or that might offer instruction for
protecting ourselves from the fatal hold of this particular—but
not
interminable—inferno, in which we currently dwell.

Acknowledgements

Deep thanks to Dovar Chen for the digital
artistry, and to Gorda Stanisic for research assistance on the BP
disaster. For smart and generous criticism, my gratitude to two
anonymous reviewers and, as always, the Oxidate Working Group.

Notes

1 The digital video
accompanying this text is archived footage of the BP oil disaster and
the gushing Macondo well recorded on May 22, 2010. The film was edited
by digital editor Dovar Chen with a soundtrack
added. The video was retrieved January 10, 2012 from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KoL41Lu5aA

2 For more on postcolonial
literatures and magic realism see Slemon (1995). For more on literature
and petro-capitalism see Ghosh (1992).

3 For the full version of
the stunning 1969 poem discussed by LeMenager that narrates the bonfire
of the dead, written by Conyus, a member of the prison work crews sent
by Union Oil to Santa Barbara, see:
http://alyoung.org/2015/05/24/the-great-santa-barbara-oil-disaster-or-a-diary-a-poem-by-conyus-reissued/

References

Bayer, B. (2012). Enchantment in an age of Occupy.
WSQ 40(3-4), 27-50.

Zuck, R. R. (2012). The wizard of oil:
Abraham James, the Harmonial wells, and the psychometric history of the
oil industry. Journal of American
Studies 46(2), 313-336.

Bio

Jackie Orr
is Associate Professor of
Sociology at Syracuse University, and a performance theorist working at
the crossroads of cultural critique, the politics of bodies, and the
poetics of knowledge. Her scholarship focuses on contemporary and
cultural theory, and critical studies of technoscience and media. She
is the author of Panic Diaries: A
Genealogy of Panic Disorder (Duke,
2006). Her live digital performance work includes "Daddy Does
Cybernetics," "The PSYCHOpolitics of Bioterrorism," and "Body
Animations (or, Lullaby for Fallujah)." Her most recent performance
piece, "Slow Disaster at the Digital Edge," stages the BP disaster in
relation to the everyday catastrophe of deep time, and has recently
been performed at the University of Chicago, Goldsmiths, Buddies in Bad
Times Theater (Toronto), and Rhode Island School of Design.